Scot,
I posted something about this nearly four years ago (hard to believe it’s been that long). It’s something I struggle with, and — from the comments I received at the time — it’s fairly common — especially for those who are in fulltime vocational ministry. You can read what I wrote here: http://blog.faith20.org/?p=114

That would be me.

I once attended a sales training seminar in which the trainer asked everyone to take out a piece of paper and make a list of their best qualities to read to the group, as if extolling the attributes of a friend. When there was an immediate outcry from the group, he observed that in his experience it was always the top producing sales people that had the hardest time with this excercise.
I guess I always regarded such attitudes as a kind of modesty, if not a false modesty. So many people have difficulty even accepting compliments that are obviously well-deserved that one has to wonder at the apparent honesty of involved. Perhaps those who practice such false modesty could rightly be called impostors. The irony is that they really believe their own devalued estimations of themselves.
This instructor suggested that these people complete the exercise and make it a practice to read their lists out loud to themselves daily. I think a good place for some to start would be to just learn how to accept compliments by responding with the simple words: “Thank you.” In my own case, that’s helped me with my self-image a lot.
I wonder at what point such self-deprication becomes a syndrome.

Scot, I suspect just about the whole of Scotland may be infected with this! I was just commenting on my blog that I had been filling in an application form and I found it incredibly difficult to fill in the section about my accomplishments. Speaking to other Scots I know I am not alone in this.
I have been wondering why we are so shy about our success. Most Scottish kids of my generation were constantly warned by our parents not to “show off” this is now deeply engrained in us. We fear being seen as “show offs” which is just about the worst thing you can be in many people’s eyes here.
This is pure speculation and may just be prejudice but I also wonder if Calvinism and its role in Scotland also had something to do with how this developed. That there was such an emphasis on God’s grace and against the merit of any human achievement or effort in relation to salvation that this attitude took root in all areas of our life.
Or it could be that the Darien disaster which bankrupted the nation and forced Union with England destroyed our national self-confidence.
Who knows but what ever a Scot sings its rarely their own praises

I think this is part of working out our salvation in fear in trembling. I am a new creature, yet I still sin. I’ve let go of much of this “worry,” especially in the last couple of years, but I still struggle with this – likely much more than many people I know. The worst part is when I try to explain it to others, they rarely ever understand. I’m not just referring to Being saved, but also to being good – by nature or by action.
I deeply deeply want to hear “well done, good and faithful servant,” because…it’s not right that He died for me. It’s just not right…
DJ
AMDG

Sociologist William Weston had a post about this topic just last week called Women Think They Are Imposters. I’m not entirely convinced that men are less likely to think they are imposters. I suspect there may be a gender difference in how they deal with it. I think women tend to become more timid and men tend to become more delusional.
If men are so confident in themselves why is that they need cheerleaders at sports events and women don’t?

Michael,
I agree – it is not just women. In fact the two cases where I have seen this type of response in its most detrimental form – where it paralyzes the ability to succeed – were both men.
For most of us this doesn’t reach an extreme, but I think that it is a bigger problem for women because those nagging doubts can be reinforced rather than assuaged by verbal and nonverbal feedback. I would guess that evangelical women in biblical and theological studies are often in such an environment. There are other fields where it is a problem as well (esp. competitive male dominated fields).
Best response is to realize that these thoughts and doubts are “normal” and forge forth anyway.
If it is paralyzing – find someone to talk with.

I was interested and surprised to see this post here today. I just came across this in a book I am reading (Changing Course, by Claudia Black):
“adult skills are often taken for granted, except by those who may not have had the opportunity to develop them. If we did not learn these skills as a child and adolescent, we move into adulthood forced to experience ourselves as if we were an imposter. we try to hide our performance anxiety, fear of change and fear of problem-solving, spending a great amount of time and energy manipulating our environment so we don’t have to be confronted with what we perceive to be our “insufficiency.” but often we didn’t know or didn’t understand there was another way to be.”
I definitely have experienced this and for me at least, it’s tied to some losses from my past.

A while back, I read this description on another blog:
http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2008/12/im-not-fit-for-ministry/#more-1573
So, pathetic navel-gazing time: I feel this quite a bit. My dad often told me that any company that hired me would go broke. Everyone from my family tends to be driven and tends to stand out at what they do, good or bad. I graduated with a B.S. Computer Science with a 3.5 gpa, and have done well in the two jobs, including my current one, I have held in that field for over eight years now. I am a part-time student working towards an M.Div. and have mostly “A”s. Still, there is a small part of me that wonders every day if today is the day the seminary kicks me out or the day I get fired from work. I am slowly learning to be motivated by love of the subject rather than fear of failure. The better I do at that, it seems the better I do with the task at hand.
I think the most helpful thing for me is to keep trusting the Lord and keep interacting with gracious friends, keep listening to my wonderful wife, and supporting her and my son as well. There is something very good about positive family interactions – a fact that makes the family metaphor for church that much richer.

http://www.ImpostorQuiz.com

Well at least this isn’t a disorder yet… So are there medications all of us who feel like complete poseurs most of the time can take to be “normal”?
I do find the posting of this really interesting in light of the recent discussions that people today have too much self-esteem and that studies “prove” that women don’t have less self-esteem than men. Maybe if we actually had self-esteem and thought we could be successful then we wouldn’t feel like impostors…

“This is every man’s deepest fear: to be exposed, to be found out, to be discovered as an imposter, and not really a man.”
- John Eldredge
Eldredge suggests that most people feel like they are imposters faking their way through life, at least in part because they have never really had a guide; they’ve never been well mentored or trained up into maturity, and thus react one of two ways:
(1) they attack that fear in order to prove it wrong; they become driven achievers who at heart still are motivated by the fear and uncertainty that the next time they maybe won’t come through and will be discovered as a fraud so they need to “prove” again and again that they are the real deal; but the “real them” is underneath the decorated high achiever, afraid of being found out to be something different. Or else;
(2) rather than becoming driven achievers who attack their fear trying desperately to disprove it, they react into passivity; they retreat from trying anything that doesn’t come easy out of fear of failure – perhaps the paralyzing kind of fear that RJS is referring to. This has nothing to do with their innate talents – a very gifted person may be this way.
Eldredge can be simplistic and is problematic in various ways and for different reasons, but as a former counselor, some of his insight of the human person has been helpful to me – or has at least struck a chord.

On the one hand I think there’s a natural/cultural emphasis on humility that may make people downplay their accomplishments. Few things are as painful as having to build yourself up on a resume. It feels so wrong.
On the other hand, I wonder if some of this might be an unconscious sense that there are things that are more important than our “accomplishments,” and there we are lacking.

This sounds very accurate to describe my wife. She has just finished her M.Div with a very high GPA (much higher than mine:) and yet she still feels as though she is stupid and that everyone else in the class is smarter than her and that if the professor actually knew what she was capable of she would be deemed unfit for ministry. It caused enough anxiety early in her seminary career that she sought medical help and through therapy was able to identify the downward cycle of her thoughts and reflect on experiences in her childhood in which she was told she was stupid which have left lasting impressions on her. For others who struggle with this I would suggest seeking out a behavioral psychologist to help walk you through the process, I don’t think my wife would have made it through seminary without this help.

I fight the imposter thing too. It has been hard as a pastor and a woman. there are not as many validations in the church and its hard to get a sense of actual reality about giftedness and abilities. i have a tendency to look for evididence in success but it is still uncertain if i have actually been successful. Even a grade on a paper or a test is uncertain.

I used to think I had impostor syndrome, but now I think I was just faking it.
Seriously — yup, that pegs me (a man — not limited to women). For Americans at least, part of it must be our popular culture — nothing is ever good enough, never rest, “Be a Tiger”. Our spiritual heritage feeds into it, I’m sure — both the Puritan tradition and the revivalism of the Great Awakenings. For all their very good aspects, they are perfectionist at heart.

I struggle with this all the time. I am an adjunct professor right now and when a guest speaker spoke of me in complimentary terms to my class as an “important professor,” I felt a jolt. “I’m just an adjunct!” thought I. Don’t refer to me as a professor! And then I caught myself thinking one day, completely without ego, “these kids have no idea how lucky they are to have someone like me teaching them,” and then found myself thinking: What? Lucky to have moi? What kind of thought is that? How can I think they are lucky to have me? And then I thought, wait a minute, you diminish yourself, but they ARE lucky, because someone overqualified and caring has stumbled into their lives, and I wondered why I can’t own a lifetime of accomplishments, including, beyond technical skills, my own growth in compassion.

What is interesting to me, as I process my own version of “Imposter Syndrome”, is that as I have come to fully embrace my weaknesses (what I call the Purple Martyrdom) — true brokenness and weaknesses, now — God is able to use me to do things that I would have never thought I could attempt…because I did not have the “credentials” necessary.
It is in those moments when God is making his power manifest in my weakness that the strengths that I really do have are able to be employed as support to whatever it is that God is doing. They just have not been used to playing second fiddle, as it were.
I am getting better at responding to praise with some version of “God is gracious and I am honored to be of service to the Kingdom” that is honest and without false humility. But this goes hand-in-hand with getting better as responding to criticism with some version of “God, have mercy on me and use me in whatever way advances your Kingdom” that is honest and looking to grow more like Christ.
I especially resonate with the earlier comment that this syndrome is part of the consequence for the putting aside of apprenticeship as a real process through which incompetence is worked into competence by a master pouring into the life of a willing learner.

Ah, yes, that old friend “imposter syndrome”. I did a bunch of research on high intelligence last year and imposter syndrome is extremely prevalent among people with unusually high intelligence. We have this very bizarre thing in our culture where pretty much every natural ability is encouraged and affirmed except for high intelligence. (Obviously, there are exceptions, but most of us don’t live in the exceptions.) There is a perception that people who are unusually smart will be pompous and arrogant (which anyone who has spent time at a top tier college knows can happen). However, normally people will high intelligence are not taught about this part of themselves and how it affects them. Not understanding themselves and their abilities, there can be a pervasive dissonance between how they see themselves (pretty normal) and how other people react to them. Add that the reality that humans generally have a stronger response to the negative than to the positive, and many people will deeply absorb negative messages that they receive while not knowing what to do with the positive feedback they get. I’m afraid that I don’t know the extent to which impostor syndrome affects more people. I just know that it is a huge presence in the lives of many, many highly intelligent people. I think that for those people what we need more than anything is to help them understand this aspect of how God has created them and more fully integrate it into their lives. Once a person can understand that their normal is someone else’s exceptional, figuring out how to deal with positive feedback and how to work to their full potential become much easier.
I also have to add one more thing about the roll of humility in this matter. One of the ways that the enemy (or however one conceives of evil and its distorting effects on us) functions is by taking something which is a gift of God and twisting it into a destructive facsimile of that gift. If you look at Jesus’ temptation in the desert or even what has happen with sex in our times, you get a pretty good picture of this in action. The virtue of humility is prone to this destructive twisting as much as anything. Sometimes a person will be taught or buy into the idea that acknowledging or owning good things about themselves is wrong. This is destructive humility. It is not God honoring to deny good things about ourselves and it can be crippling or controlling in our lives. Real, Godly humility is being able to look at what is good in ourselves and be amazed that God has put it there. It is seeing our gifts as tools provided by God that we are responsible for using as He sees fit rather than thinking they are there because of ourselves and are there to serve our own desires. Godly humility knows that we will never use these tools perfectly because we are still imperfect human beings. Yet it does not deny or diminish their presence and power in our lives because to do so would be diminishing the gifts of God, which is not our right or place to do.

If it is common among women academics, perhaps that behaviour of their male colleagues may either create it or feed off it. Many years ago when I was studying chemistry at university, Professor Dorothy Hodgkin OM FRS Nobel Laureate, came to speak. The next day, our professor asked us what we thought of her. He then spoke of how lucky she had been in her career and that there were chemists at our university who were just as clever as her. The grapes would have been useless for making vinegar.

WGG,
I am not sure that the male colleagues create it – but they often reinforce it overtly or subtly, even subconsciously. Somehow your story doesn’t surprise me.

Sounds like an ENTP

What do you call those of us who assume that all our good luck reflects our innate excellence?
I guess I’ve outed myself above as someone who does not have imposter syndrome. I do, however, have an assumption that anybody else could jump in and do my job – even though it has often been disproved by the events. Is this imposter syndrome by proxy?

I have worked in Christian environments for more than 20 years, and I have experienced and observed many instances where women are expected to assign their ideas and accomplishmnets to men. In one instance, the name of a male in the denomination was put on award-winning work that everyone knew was done by a woman. She was promised a raise and promotion, but when the time came, the “powers that be” looked at the finished piece and said, “Well, Joe Blow’s name is on it, so Joe Blow did it.” Who wouldn’t feel like an imposter? When a person is inclined through childhood experience or personality type to feel that they are “bragging” if they tell the truth about their accomplishments, this type of work environment only heightens the feeling that you are not allowed to be yourself. Or even that it’s wrong to be yourself. Speaking up is considered “taking the credit away from Jesus.”

Your Name (#12) — where did Eldredge write about this? I would really like to read more.
This “imposter” thing sounds like something that has been the driving force for my entire life, and it has been very destructive. Its not just the perfectionist drive — its the constantly questioning of myself after the fact, and actually calling myself names. Every day I feel like I have to prove myself “worthy” again. I have had unusual success in my life (perfect score on the SAT, graduated near the top of an Ivy League school; reached top of my profession), but still constantly (daily) beat up on myself. Just started discussion about this in therapy. I’d be curious to hear from anyone who has actually worked through this sort of problem, which often feels debilitating.

No Name Today, one of the things which has been most helpful for me is spending time around someone I know well enough to have a realistic warts-and-all view of who does not suffer from “impostor syndrome” or other forms of self-confidence problems. For me, it is my husband. Over the years it has been amazing to me to watch him do things that I had thought were wrong; presenting his accomplishments in the best personal light for professional purposes (and feeling good that he had these accomplishments to put forward!), taking ownership of his own hard work and abilities to the point of being willing to fight for them. Working to get others to trust his abilities up front so that each round of work doesn’t necessitate re-establishing his competence. He confidently asks questions, doesn’t care if he hears “no” and honestly, he trusts his own inner voice. Of course, he struggles much more with remembering that God is the ultimate source of his abilities and success than I do and is a bit more prone to bias about himself than I am. But watching him break all of my internal self-restricting rules and be successful, respected and happy while doing so has been very helpful in imagining other ways of being myself.
Also, I came to the conclusion that I had agreed with what was essentially a demonic form of humility in which I saw owning positive things about myself as toxic. I actually said a prayer of deliverance renouncing this demonic hold on my thinking. It was like one last barrier that needed to be removed before I could begin to recover from this debilitating form of self-effacement. The problem really is that even once you get rid of once self-destructive way of thinking, you have to learn a new way of thinking or you’ll just slip back into the old. That is where paying attention to someone like my husband is really helpful. (I’ve also heard that if you don’t know a flesh and blood person like this, using a fictional character who is appropriately confident can work.) Good luck! I’ve been there and I know how hard and painful this can be.

I was surprised by the comment that this would be typical of an ENTP. I’m an INTJ, and I “suffer” from this to the extreme.

Our material “accomplishments” are little more than a rearrangement of deck chairs. The work that matters concerns the human heart. And as our hearts, and the hearts of those we touch, are positively transformed, we can take satisfaction in knowing that we played a small part.

No Name Today @25, this theme is common in Eldredge’s writings. I think he unfortunately and often wrongly splits and dichotomizes male/female experience; he can overemphasize some gender differences into harmful stereotypes (i.e. especially in his “Wild at Heart” for men, and his “Captivating” for women), but both of those books, as well as his “Way of the Wild Heart” on the masculine journey to maturity, contain some of his writings on these topics. His book “Waking the Dead” takes a more gender-neutral look at some of the same themes, and the book that he co-authored with friend and fellow counselor Brent Curtis, titled “The Sacred Romance” does as well. Eldredge may not be your cup of tea – I disagree strongly with him at times and wince at his over-simplification and lack of nuance at others, but some of his counseling-related insights into the human person and this phenomenon of feeling like a poser or an imposter, have been helpful to me.

By the way, acknowledging our accomplishments does not mean we are defined by those accomplishments. I’m not sure that “internalizing our accomplishments” is even healthy (need better definition of “internalizing” perhaps). I don’t find a strong positive correlation of accomplishment and identity in any of the classic spiritual literature. It’s usually just the opposite, no?
This is a fascinating discussion. Rebeccat (#19 / 26) is especially helpful.

First, I want to say that this blog has been a blessing to me, as a Christian in academics, and this is my first comment on here.
I and my girlfriend, who are both graduate students in meteorology (that’s the study of the weather, not meteors ), both struggle quite a bit with this “Imposter Syndrome”. Pretty much everything in the original post describes how I’ve felt at one time or another, and especially now as I’m trying to wrap up my dissertation. I’ve been known to go down to the school library and look at others dissertations and worry over how my own work didn’t have nearly as much quality as nearly everyone else’s. I’ve often caught myself feeling ashamed at the two major national fellowships that I’ve received, feeling like I should have done more or better work to justify having been awarded them. Even though my research advisor has reassured me time and time again that I’m a great student, I still worry that at some point he’s going to “bring down the gavel” somehow. The list goes on and on.
Most of the time, I feel I’ve been able to keep these destructive thoughts and attitudes in check, but they sometimes still get the best of me. The worst effects, at least in my case, are that it sometimes paralyzes me, keeping me from getting work done, which of course feeds back into my feelings of inadequacy, and so on…
My girlfriend could probably echo many of the same sentiments.
Anyway, knowing that others (including my girlfriend) struggle with this, is an anchor for me that keeps me from falling into despair. I’ve often prayed that God would deliver me from this thorn in my side. The times when I remember his work in my life up to this point, and how blessed I truly am, are the times when this “Imposter Syndrome” has the least power over me.